I saw that "mailsync doesn't work from cron" problem under Ubuntu 6.06, using mailsync 5.2.1-2build1; given that unstable has 5.2.2 and it (and libc-client) has the exact same lines of code, the analysis below applies there too...
Given a .mailsyncrc including channel slurp imapmail localfile { msinfo mailsync-mail.msinfo } (imapmail and localfile left out as irrelevant) I put "strace mailsync -n slurp" in cron, and saw this: 21438 open("/var/mail/anonymous/mailsync-mail/", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_LARGEFILE|O_DIRECTORY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) 21438 open("/var/mail/anonymous", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_LARGEFILE|O_DIRECTORY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) "That's not right" :-) Turns out that the execve line shows that cron has a very limited environment - the only settings are SHELL, PATH, PWD, LANG, SHLVL, HOME, LANGUAGE, LOGNAME, and _ Note that this *doesn't* include USER; I can trigger the problem directly by doing (unset USER; mailsync -n slurp) Synchronizing stores "imapmail" <-> "localfile"... Authorizing against {..../imap} Error: Can't open mailbox mailsync-mail.msinfo: no such mailbox Error: Couldn't open msinfo box mailsync-mail.msinfo. Aborting! Adding an explicit USER=eichin to the crontab *worked*, so is a plausible workaround. Looking at the code... mailsync-5.2.1/src/mailsync_main.cc line 93 (in main): // initialize c-client environment (~/.imparc etc.) env_init( getenv("USER"), getenv("HOME")); uw-imap-2002edebian1/src/osdep/unix/env_unix.c line 656 (in env_init): /* myUserName must be set before dorc() call */ myUserName = cpystr (user ? user : ANONYMOUSUSER); Also, the comment describing env_init says: * Accepts: user name (NIL for anonymous) I'd suggest that perhaps instead of getenv("USER") perhaps getpwuid(geteuid()) is appropriate... or even something like getenv("USER") || getpwuid(geteuid())->pw_name to allow the user to set $USER and fall back to getpwuid, rather than doing the unintentional anonymous path. The UW docs do talk about customizing env_init, as an alternative: http://www.washington.edu/imap/documentation/CONFIG.html but it looks like that should be site-specific, not application specific, and just passing something different to env_init is a better fix. _Mark_ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Herd Of Kittens -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]